The Buried

Excavating the Egyptian Revolution.

The temple of Seti I, in Abydos, which dates to the fourteenth century B.C., was the site of protests by villagers during the recent revolution. Looters also came to Abydos; since then, archeologists have been assessing what was lost.

Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum

From Cairo, it’s only about three hundred miles to Abydos, in Upper Egypt, but the distance feels much greater. This region has been a world apart ever since Pharaonic times. The ancient Egyptians separated their land into Upper and Lower, a division that confuses moderns who orient themselves by the compass rather than by the Nile. Upper Egypt lies to the south, where the river has carved a deep gorge into the North African plateau. At Abydos, the gorge is about fifteen miles wide, flanked on both sides by high cliffs that are the color of sand. There’s no rain to speak of, and the surrounding desert is absolute: from the air, the narrow corridor of green along the Nile appears hopelessly isolated. Head due west and the next river you cross is in South Florida. But more than thirty million people live in this arid place, representing about forty per cent of the country’s population. An even greater miracle is how long they’ve been here. This was the cradle of Egyptian civilization, and the earliest known hieroglyphics, dating to around 3200 B.C., were discovered inscribed into relics that had been buried near those Abydos cliffs.

Abydos is the ancient name for a cluster of villages at the western edge of the gorge. During much of Pharaonic times, this was the most sacred spot in the country, and today there’s still an elevated stretch of desert next to town that’s largely protected from any farming or development. Locals call it al-Madfuna: the Buried. For more than five millennia, this ground was used as a cemetery, and it’s been the focus of intensive archeological work since the mid-eighteen-hundreds. It’s also attracted looters during times of political instability. In February of 2011, as the revolution gathered strength in Tahrir Square, all across the country the police disappeared, and in the Buried teams of looters opened more than two hundred pits. It wasn’t until the end of March, after President Hosni Mubarak resigned and the national situation had stabilized somewhat, that village police resumed patrols of the site.

Nearly two years later, in January of 2013, a team from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University arrived to undertake an archeology of the revolution. They followed the thieves’ tracks across the Buried, seeing where they had gone, and how they had dug, and what they had destroyed. The archeologists excavated every major looting pit, measuring and mapping with satellite imagery. The team included four excavators, three conservators, two surveyors, two architectural specialists, a photographer, an artist, and two inspectors from the Ministry of Antiquities. They hired more than fifty local laborers. Some men specialized in digging out sand, and there were boys who carried it away in buckets, while other boys poured the sand through wire screens in search of broken artifacts. Six teen-agers were hired specifically to handle a custom-built fifteen-foot-tall stepladder that allowed the photographer to shoot the pits from above, as if they were crime scenes. Uncovered relics tended to be forensic rather than Pharaonic. Conversations could be as crisp as Chandler.

“There are cigarette butts here.”

“This is our best find of the day.”

“So it’s filtered?”

“The filter suggests that it’s not one hundred years old.”

“This is round. The ancient Egyptians did not build round things like that here.”

A circular brick wall had been partially excavated from the sand—such a shape would never have been used for an ancient tomb. The field director, Matthew Adams, knelt and studied the bricks, along with a young archeologist named Kate Scott, who was overseeing this particular dig. Both wore broad-brimmed hats; at eight o’clock in the morning the sun was already hot.

“They hacked at the wall top,” Scott said. “It’s clear that there was a disturbance here, and that a structure was affected. But it’s not clear what this structure is.”

“That’s heat-treated brick.”

“No question about it. Those are not ancient bricks.”

“The looters saw the wall and didn’t know what it was. They hacked at it a bit. But in this area they didn’t appear to be all that determined.”

The evidence was clear: looters had mistakenly targeted a modern structure. Adams speculated that it might have been a shepherd’s hut from the nineteen-fifties, or even a field house from an early archeological dig. Around the turn of the last century, large-scale excavations dramatically reshaped the landscape, leaving mounds of backfill all across the Buried. Adams told me that looters often targeted these mounds, which they assumed were situated above buried tombs. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “But we don’t want them to know that.”

The misreading of the landscape indicated that most thieves hadn’t come from local excavation crews. For years, the Institute of Fine Arts has maintained a field house in the Buried, and the local staff remained there throughout the early days of the revolution. They organized teams of volunteer watchmen, who tried their best to protect the site, but there had been limits to what they could do without police support. They believed that most thieves had come from nearby villages, and Adams estimated that about half the looting pits were essentially random. Even the more directed attempts were usually misguided. In another part of the Buried, a team of German archeologists had recently excavated and restored a royal tomb, using modern brick to fill an ancient hole that had been punched out by looters at least four millennia ago. After the revolution, new looters arrived and followed the exact same path—they even tore out the modern brick, as if suspecting that the Germans had hidden stacks of euros behind their restoration.

But this is no secret among archeologists: the finest minds of post-revolution Egypt are not involved in grave robbing. Adams told me that the haphazard dig pattern was actually one reason that he undertook this season’s project, because it gave him the opportunity to excavate sections of the Buried that he hadn’t studied before. “We’re sorting out what happened during the looting, but it’s also a preview of what’s out there,” he said. In their own way, the archeologists were trying to make sense of the effects of the revolution, like everybody else in Egypt. “All of this information we can use to structure future excavations,” Adams said. “It has the effect of creating a survey. They did a lot of damage, of course, but it also has a positive effect.”

Much of what the archeologists found in the looters’ pits was trash. Sometimes they uncovered the thieves’ tools: buckets, baskets, digging implements. There was a great deal of broken pottery. In one pit, they found the torso of a mummy that had been ripped apart, probably by ancient looters. Another hole contained a scrap of paper with a laundry list of clothing items, written in an elegant hand; most likely, it had been left by Arthur Mace, a British Egyptologist who excavated here around 1900. They found beads that had lain underground for three millennia. A number of pits contained bullets, likely artifacts of the Arab Spring.

It took almost a year for the revolution to reach Abydos. Even in the first month, when demonstrations raged all across northern Egypt, the villagers didn’t protest. They finally held their first demonstration in December of 2011, when about a thousand people gathered at the temple of Seti I. It’s the most intact Bronze Age temple in Egypt, dating to the fourteenth century B.C. In the plaza in front of the temple, Abydos citizens demanded better distribution of subsidized cooking gas, and they called for the resignation of the village rayis, or president. They took their cues from Tahrir: they chanted Cairo slogans and held signs that read, “The Youth of Abydos: We Want to Change the Head of the Village.” And within a week the government announced that the president had been transferred to another posting. For the youth, this seemed to follow the appropriate Cairo pattern, and they dispersed peacefully, the way that the first round of Egyptian protests had ended with Mubarak’s resignation. After that, there weren’t any more demonstrations in Abydos.

But two months later the village president quietly returned to his old office. It’s a block from the temple, and there’s a sign above the door that reads, in hieroglyphics, “President of the Unit.” When I visited in March, the president told me that he had spent his exile doing government work in el-Balyana, a nearby town. “It was for my own safety,” he said, through a translator. “And then I came back. People welcomed me.” His name was Hussein Mohammed Abdel Rady, and he was a rugged-looking man with tired eyes. In addition to his political work, he ran a small farm not far from Abydos, on the eastern bank of the Nile. He grew bananas. On his desk, a copy of the Koran sat next to a box of pills labelled, in English, “Provide Relief of Pain for Up to Three Days.” Rady told me that this was a challenging time to be in government. He was in charge of nine villages with a total population of around sixty thousand, and he said that about a quarter of the youth were unemployed. On my first visit, his granddaughter was dozing in a chair beside his desk, because she had left school sick. She slept through a steady stream of citizens arriving with requests, including an elderly duck farmer who complained at field-worker volume about problems at a local medical clinic. “If you ever need any ducks, just ask me!” the farmer shouted, after Rady had promised to help. “And not just ducks—any poultry!”

Rady wasn’t interested in discussing the national situation or the Muslim Brotherhood, which at that time was running the country. He had nothing to say about the breakdown in the security forces. “It’s for reasons that we don’t know,” he said. “It’s something bigger than us, something that we can’t talk about.” This was the most common complaint in Abydos, and the same was true in other parts of Egypt, where police had largely disappeared from the streets. In Abydos, they still patrolled the Buried, but otherwise there was little activity. The cops I met seemed demoralized—they were deeply unhappy about Brotherhood rule. A couple of police told me that they were waiting for some more powerful authority to emerge and define their new role in the post-revolution environment.

At night, it was common to hear gunfire. Across the country, there has been a large influx of weapons from Libya, where the security apparatus has disintegrated in the wake of Qaddafi’s fall. Upper Egyptians have a long tradition of hoarding weapons, but in the past they tended to be discreet, and periodically the police conducted searches and confiscated firearms. But now there was essentially no control. In my hotel room in Abydos, I was awakened occasionally by the sound of automatic gunfire, and people often bragged about new weapons they’d purchased. At times, it felt as if the state were collapsing in slow motion—every evening, the electricity was cut off, and lines at gas stations could be more than a hundred vehicles long. When I drove through Bar el-Khail, a neighboring village whose residents had a reputation as shrewd traders, I saw children sitting curbside with milk cartons full of diesel fuel, the Upper Egyptian version of a lemonade stand. (“If I shake the hand of someone from Bar el-Khail, I count my fingers afterward,” my driver remarked.)

And yet somehow it all held together. Abydos remained safe, and I could wander alone at night without worrying. Rady told me that he lacked sufficient government funds, and since the revolution there was no functioning legislative body that was able to initiate simple development projects. But people found other ways to get things done. In order to establish a new medical clinic, Rady had persuaded a local clan to donate land, because he couldn’t buy it. Another clan was building a wall for an underfunded elementary school. There was also a lot of construction noise—my hotel was in the process of more than doubling in size. I heard about surprising amounts of construction in other parts of Upper Egypt, where there’s always been a large, unofficial cash economy, and where builders may have been taking advantage of reduced government oversight.

Even the gunfire had more to do with economics than with violence. I learned to recognize patterns: a short series of shots usually indicated that a buyer was testing a gun somewhere at the edge of the desert; longer bursts of automatic fire tended to come from weddings or other celebrations. Guns had always been part of such events, but they had become much more prominent since the revolution. Ahmad and Medhat Diab, two brothers from a powerful clan called the Howeitat, explained to me how the wedding traditions had changed.

“During the days of Mubarak, if you were in a wedding, the best man was the one who gave the most tips,” Ahmad said. “But now the best man is the one who shoots the most bullets.”

He said that high demand had increased the price of a bullet to as much as three dollars. “If you have a wedding, everybody comes with a weapon,” he said. “The singer sings for a while, and then he’ll say, ‘Medhat!’ And he’ll shoot three bullets. Then the singer will say, ‘Ahmad!’ And I’ll shoot ten. Whoever gets his name called shows that he has bullets.”

In a way, the situation was almost reassuring: when authority disappeared, and guns became widely available, the local instinct seemed to be to show off rather than to fight. I told the Diab brothers that I had heard about an epic wedding earlier in the year, when constant gunfire kept the archeologists awake until 2 A.M.

“That was ours!” Ahmad said. “We did it on purpose—to show everybody that this is us.”

I asked who had got married.

“Actually, it wasn’t a wedding,” Ahmad said.

“It was a circumcision,” Medhat said.

“We were just looking for an excuse,” Ahmad admitted. “Some kid got circumcised, so we did it. We shot so many bullets—there must have been ten thousand.”

Medhat smiled and said, “People called to compliment us afterward.”

When I asked one clan elder about the revolution’s effects in Abydos, he laughed and said, “What revolution?” Villagers liked to talk idly about national politics, but their focus had to be local and practical. The archeologists were different—their perspective tended to be more theoretical and imaginative. But the effect was much the same, because the scholars also couldn’t afford to be too distracted by whatever was happening in Cairo. Matthew Adams said that out in the Buried he felt a sense of “deep time,” which diminished the significance of daily headlines. During Adams’s first season in Abydos, in October of 1981, President Anwar Sadat had been assassinated. “We didn’t know what would happen—would we have to escape?” Adams said. “But within a few days it was clear that things would continue, although the media presented what was happening in Cairo as ‘Egypt is exploding!’ ” Back then, Adams worked as an intern in the field-house lab, sorting and analyzing thousands of shards of ancient pottery. He told me that the autumn of Sadat’s assassination was the most tedious season he had ever spent in Egypt.

He much preferred being out in the field, and he liked the wide-ranging work of the current season. Sometimes the looters’ tracks led the archeologists to large tombs, and one morning we stood at the edge of a grave complex that dated to the fifteenth century B.C. “This is the front pylon, a big monumental gateway,” Adams said, pointing to a long wall of gray brick that workers were excavating from the sand. Originally, such tomb structures would have been visible to the living, who made regular offerings to the dead. Lavish tombs were a key characteristic of ancient Egyptian culture, dating back to prehistoric periods. Barry Kemp, an archeologist who works in Upper Egypt, has noted that such signs of “conspicuous consumption and display” are among the earliest evidence of the development of the state. Kemp points out that ancient Egypt lacked some factors that moderns assume to be fundamental to early civilization. Egyptians organized no large projects to control the Nile, and they did relatively little in terms of irrigation, relying on annual flood cycles. There wasn’t a particularly high level of foreign trade or conflict for the first two millennia. Only then was the wheel introduced, well over a thousand years after the most impressive pyramids were built. But Egyptian agriculture was prosperous, because the Nile’s natural cycles worked so well. And society was highly stratified and competitive. In Abydos, this quality remained unchanged by deep time—human beings seemed to possess an eternal need to acquire and then conspicuously spend their wealth, whether by shooting it into the air or burying it underground.

Adams told me that the large tomb with the monumental gateway had originally belonged to Sitepehu, a mayor and an overseer of priests. “He was an élite,” Adams said. “The scale here is a statement of status.” He said that this was one of the revelations of the season: the team had learned that this section of the Buried had been a cemetery for élites during the New Kingdom, a period that spanned roughly 1550 B.C. to 1069 B.C. “This area should become a focus of major field work and research in the future,” Adams said.

Adams is fifty-one years old, and he has the well-cooked appearance of any Westerner who works in the Sahara. His ears and cheeks are red, and the shadow of his shirt line has been permanently burned into his neck—a V-shaped hieroglyph that means “Egyptologist.” Adams had never wanted to be anything else. As a young child in West Virginia, he was so inspired by reading National Geographic that he copied hieroglyphics onto bedsheets and built an ancient Egyptian tomb in his grandmother’s garage. He studied archeology as an undergraduate and a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, whose museum contains a statue of Sitepehu. “It’s from this tomb,” Adams said, pointing at the dig in front of us. “It’s a profound experience for me, having grown up with that statue—very nice piece, Eighteenth Dynasty—and here I am years later, supervising the reëxcavation of that man’s tomb.”

The statue had been removed by Arthur Mace, the British Egyptologist. But Mace, like most early archeologists, was intent on retrieving relics, and he left only rudimentary maps and diagrams of his digs. The current generation of scholars remained unaware of the exact location of Sitepehu’s tomb until the looters took them there. For the first time, Adams was able to see details of construction, but he also found a gray mess of broken brick where looters had hacked through a wall, unaware that the tomb’s most valuable relic has been sitting in Philadelphia for a century. “The effort must have been tremendous,” he said. “And there’s nothing for them to find.”

Adams has spent nineteen seasons in Abydos, and he’s made academic breakthroughs about the construction and the ritual use of buried structures. But he has yet to find a significant statue or a relic of gold or silver with much monetary value. Most tombs were looted of portable treasures in ancient times, and then early archeologists picked through whatever was left. Adams told me that another purpose of this season’s work was “propagandistic”: he hoped that the local labor force would see the empty tombs and spread the word around the villages.

Most workers were boys who ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. Abydos is in Sohag, Egypt’s poorest governorate, and it’s always been common for boys to quit school early. In the Buried, they earn between four and seven dollars a day. On the first day of the season, so many people showed up looking for work that a fight broke out. Quite a few of them were illiterate, and signed their weekly pay receipts with a thumbprint.

After work, the boys often hung out at a coffee shack at the edge of the Buried. One day, I asked what they were learning from the excavations.

“What we learn is that ancient Egyptian society had social classes,” a teen-ager named Hamed Ahmed said. “Like those big stones they used for building. How did they move the big stones? The poor people were the ones carrying the stones.” He continued, “We’re doing the same thing, just like them.”

“In the past, we thought it was the djinn who did this work,” Ahmed Abdel Latif, another boy, said. “That’s what the people in the village used to believe. But nowadays we understand that it was the poor who did this work for the rich.”

“We see the same thing happening now,” Hamed said. “The rich are doing nothing, and the poor do all the work.”

Ahmed said, “The poor don’t get mummified, and the rich get mummified.”

In the Buried, only one large ancient structure still stands. It dominates the landscape, a rectangular enclosure with walls that are nearly thirty-five feet high. It was built in the twenty-seventh century B.C., and it’s one of the oldest surviving mud-brick structures on earth, although its original purpose was forgotten for millennia. Auguste Mariette, a French Egyptologist who excavated in Abydos in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, theorized that it had been a giant Pharaonic police station that guarded against tomb raiders—wishful thinking by a man who worked during a period of much more looting than today. Locals call the enclosure the Shunet el-Zebib, the Storehouse of Raisins, a name whose origins are mysterious.

In the past decade and a half, teams from the Institute of Fine Arts have studied the area around the Shunet el-Zebib, under the guidance of Adams and David O’Connor, who directs the institute’s field program. They discovered the buried ruins of other similar structures nearby, and realized that each corresponds to a different king of the First and Second Dynasties, which ruled from around 3000 B.C. to 2686 B.C. By that time, the kings were based in Memphis, near present-day Cairo, but they continued to be buried in the ancestral homeland of Abydos. And each living king built an enclosure like the Shunet el-Zebib, which archeologists now believe was used to receive ritual offerings. While excavating these structures, Adams found evidence that they had been deliberately destroyed. After the death of a king, the walls of his enclosure were toppled and buried in some kind of ritual, and then the next ruler built his own monument.

This tradition was changed by the last king of the Second Dynasty. He built his enclosure with thicker walls, and it was left to stand. His son designed something even more permanent. Outside Memphis, he built the Step Pyramid, the world’s first monumental stone structure. Its six terraced levels form a shape that was further refined by the king’s descendants, who constructed the classic pyramids. “This royal monument is directly inspiring what we see in the pyramids,” Adams said one morning, while we walked around the Shunet el-Zebib. “What we see here in Abydos is the ancient Egyptian kings developing the vocabulary of royal power.” The concept of monumental architecture became central to the kings, who were worshipped as gods. Egyptians traced their rulers back to Osiris, the god of the dead, who was believed to have been buried in Abydos. They often created chronological lists of their rulers, and the most famous can still be seen in the temple of Seti I, where artisans decorated a wall with the names of seventy-six kings whose reigns spanned more than a millennium and a half.

But the temple list leaves out dozens of rulers who were judged to be undeserving. One omission was King Akhenaten, who came to the throne around 1351 B.C. and attempted to build on the inheritance of Abydos in unprecedented ways. He introduced monotheism to Egypt, defacing temples that competed with Aten, his favored deity. He built a new capital, Amarna, in the virgin desert of Upper Egypt. Barry Kemp, who directs the current excavations at Amarna, describes Akhenaten as being ahead of his time, in that he pioneered many techniques that would be used by dictators more than three thousand years later. In Amarna’s tombs, friezes portray the King performing open-air reviews of military troops. His bodyguards are prominent. He seems to have invented the palace-balcony scene: the benevolent ruler looks down on admiring subjects, who adopt a posture of deference. The King’s wife, Nefertiti, is often pictured, and so is their eldest daughter, who was elevated to special status. It even seems that Nefertiti may have served as co-regent, an unusual position for a woman. The King and Queen are often portrayed in statues and carvings in private homes, the way some Egyptians nowadays hang framed photographs of Gamal Abdel Nasser in their living rooms.

But Akhenaten’s new traditions died with the King. In “Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization,” Kemp writes, “Akhenaten’s kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display. The Egyptians themselves did not like what they saw. It evidently offended their sense of good taste.” They returned to the former capital; they resumed the worship of old gods; they edited Akhenaten out of history. The city of Amarna was abandoned and reclaimed by the desert. In the early nineteen-hundreds, when the German Oriental Society excavated the site, archeologists discovered the painted bust of Nefertiti that is now the most famous museum piece in Berlin. But originally it was probably just a model for artists who produced mass images of the royal family. The Germans discovered it in the ruins of a sculptor’s studio, along with other unfinished busts of the Queen, all of them discarded like yesterday’s propaganda.

Whenever I travelled to Abydos, I flew into the Sohag International Airport. The facility was opened in May of 2010, by President Mubarak, who had named it for himself. In the desert in front of the airport, the words “Mubarak Airport” were spelled out in ten-foot-tall white letters, propped up by steel rods against the Sahara wind. After the revolution, the first word was knocked down and replaced, so that the sign read “Suhag Airport.” The name of the governorate is usually spelled with an “o” instead of a “u,” but apparently locals had decided to recycle. Other letters still lay in the sand nearby—an “M,” a “B,” a “K”—as if waiting for some future change.

After two years, the story of Mubarak’s fall had become polished, like a stone that’s passed through many hands. I heard the same things in Abydos that I did in Cairo: in the beginning, Mubarak was a good leader, but then he was ruined by his wife, Suzanne. As First Lady, she had maintained a high profile through N.G.O. work, but now many Egyptians interpreted this as evidence of manipulation. They believed that she had promoted the political career of their son Gamal, who had become prominent in the waning years of the regime. And people claimed that corrupt officials took advantage of the aging Mubarak. This story was told everywhere, using the same words and phrases, and it must have reflected some universal pattern of the human mind that extended to Akhenaten and well beyond. I had even heard the same things when I lived in authoritarian China. Old Deng Xiaoping wouldn’t have fired on student protesters; his underlings made that decision. Mao Zedong was a good man until his wife, Jiang Qing, gained influence.

Most Egyptians never figured out what to make of Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically chosen President, who was elected in June of 2012. He had little charisma, and he appeared to be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization whose secrecy made people uncomfortable. But probably they would have distrusted any leader who seemed to be weaker than his group—they wanted a man, not a party. “We’re Pharaonic people, so we want one person in charge,” Ahmed el-Rowel, a psychiatrist who worked in an Abydos elementary school, told me. “We want somebody shadid.” That was another polished word of the times—“strong, stern, severe”—and people constantly applied it to their analysis of Egyptian leaders. They spoke fondly of Nasser, who had been shadid, and they said the same thing about Sadat and Mubarak. But Morsi was not shadid. In early July, when he was removed by a military coup, most Egyptians responded with relief. Even his staunchest supporters often admitted that he had been too soft—they believed that he should have been more decisive in neutralizing his enemies.

Out in the Buried, the Egyptian field director of the Institute of Fine Arts excavation, Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, told me that nothing we witness was new. He came from the town of Quft, about seventy miles upstream of Abydos. In the late eighteen-hundreds, Flinders Petrie, an Englishman who was the most influential of the early Egyptologists, hired Quft natives as field workers. Petrie was impressed with their diligence, and over time it became a tradition for archeologists to hire people from Quft. Today, many digs in Egypt include a Qufti foreman, served by a hierarchy of Qufti lieutenants. They oversee excavations, operating as intermediaries between local laborers and foreign archeologists. Few of them have much formal education, but they have a deep field knowledge of archeology.

In the Buried, everybody called Ibrahim Mohammed Ali simply al-Rayis—the President. And I met nobody in Upper Egypt, from the governor of Sohag to the Abydos village headman, who had such a physical presence. The President was a tall, thin man with dark black skin, and in the field he wore a white turban, a tan scarf, and a flowing galabiya. His clothes were always immaculate. He handled men, not sand; this was clear at a glance. He wore aviator sunglasses and carried a metal-tipped walking stick, with which he swiped at any boy worker who lagged. (“You water buffalo! May God destroy your house!”) His father had been the previous president in the Buried, and his father’s cousin had been the president before that. His grandfather had worked for Petrie in the nineteen-twenties. Once, I asked if it was possible that any Quft native had been involved in post-revolution looting. The President stared at me for a long moment, and then he said, very quietly, “No Qufti would ever do that.”

We were sitting on the porch of the Qufti field house, which is situated in the Buried. It was late afternoon, and the President was smoking from a shisha water pipe. A sign above his door said “President Ibrahim” in hieroglyphics. When the topic shifted to politics, the President told me that Mubarak had been brought down by the corruption of his underlings, and that the same thing was happening with Morsi, who at that time was still in power. “Any ruler depends on the people around him,” he said, through a translator. “It’s like Morsi. He’s good, but the consultants and advisers aren’t good. My job depends on the people around me, too. If there’s something wrong, they tell me.” He told a story about how one year in the Buried they had excavated the ancient graves of some people who clearly had been executed, which he believed had been punishment for treason against the king. (Scholars theorize that these had been sacrificial burials.) “When we find the buildings of these people, we feel that everything we’re doing is just copied from them,” he said. “When we know the history of the pharaohs, and the way that people around them behaved, we can see this. The pharaohs were corrupted by the people around them, and now we find that history is being repeated.”

In the nineteen-nineties, Matthew Adams excavated an ancient Abydos town site as part of his dissertation. Such projects are rare, in part because royal monuments and impressive tombs have always attracted archeologists. But Adams chose a former settlement that adjoins the Buried, and it dated to the First Intermediate Period, which spanned a century, from around 2160 B.C. to 2055 B.C.

In traditional historiography, this period is associated with chaos. Royal monumental construction essentially stopped, and dynasties became fragmented; one ancient source famously claims that seventy different kings ruled during a stretch of seventy days. “Behold, things have been done which have not happened for a long time past; the King has been deposed by the rabble,” a text known as the Ipuwer Papyrus claims. “Behold, it has befallen that the land has been deprived of the kingship by a few lawless men.” In Upper Egypt, archeologists have excavated the grave of a provincial governor named Ankhtifi, whose tomb inscriptions provide a glimpse of what it was like to be an official far from Memphis at this time: “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anybody to die of hunger in this [district].” The tomb lists Ankhtifi’s achievements: “I gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked . . . I gave sandals to the barefooted; I gave a wife to him who had no wife.”

During Adams’s excavation of the Abydos town site, he found no evidence of warfare, or starvation, or the effects of political chaos. He uncovered private workshops that clearly had been busy manufacturing jewelry used in burials. There was no indication of a top-down economic structure: households maintained their own granaries, and agriculture and trade seem to have been thriving. In recent years, other excavators have made similar discoveries elsewhere in Egypt, and the authority of texts like the Ipuwer Papyrus has been called into question. Adams told me that the traditional view of the ancient past has been dominated by the royal perspective, which naturally centers on the capital and portrays all aspects of society as state-controlled. And many people who left written accounts of the First Intermediate Period—provincial officials like Ankhtifi, and scribes from subsequent dynasties—had an incentive to make the national situation look worse than it really was.

“I think that the capital city, with its court culture and the royal house and the major state institutions—in a sense, it was probably a world unto itself,” Adams told me. “The evidence that we see from area to area is that people seem to be doing their own thing. And I wonder frankly if that’s been true for much of Egyptian history, not just Pharaonic times. The dominant dynamics are local and regional.” He continued, “When they had the protests here in the village, the concerns were very local. They didn’t have anything to do with Cairo.”

Despite the revolution and its aftermath, there have been almost no political changes in the Abydos region. After Morsi was elected, he appointed a new governor of Sohag, a professor of engineering named Yehia Abdel-Azim Mukhaimar. Mukhaimar was known to be sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he didn’t try to remove lower-ranking officials who had been appointed by the Mubarak regime. As governor, Mukhaimar oversaw twelve cities and more than two hundred and fifty villages, with a total population of almost four million, and yet when I visited his office in April he told me that not a single official had been dismissed as a result of the revolution. “I believe that no governor will have an efficient man working for him and remove him for his political views,” Mukhaimar said. “I want reliable people. There aren’t enough of them. I can’t afford to get rid of somebody just because of his political past.” During the summer, when the military removed Morsi, Mukhaimar turned out to be Sohag’s only political casualty—he resigned after local protests targeted him as a Brotherhood appointee.

But otherwise nothing changed. A week and a half after the coup, I stopped by the local government office in Abydos, where Rady, the village president, was still sitting at his desk with his copy of the Koran and the box of painkillers. On the wall behind him, an empty nail marked the spot where Mubarak’s portrait had hung until the revolution. The wall had been blank for more than two years; Morsi’s tenure had been too brief and weak for new images to make their way into lower-level offices. “As for the revolutions, they come and go, but we continue to work,” Rady told me. “The poor people here have nothing to do with politics. It’s not important to them. As for me, I have no time to follow politics.” While I was sitting there, a farmer came to complain about a national utilities law that he believed to be unfair. Rady shrugged and said that there was nothing he could do about it. “The guys who made that law are now in prison,” he said, and the farmer couldn’t help but laugh.

Rady had been appointed village president during the Mubarak era, but most locals seemed to like him, and I never heard him described as felool, or a “remnant,” of the old regime. Rady had nothing to say about the coup in Cairo—like other local officials I met, he refused to comment on national events. Upper Egypt has a reputation as a Brotherhood stronghold, because the organization’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, performed well there in all the post-revolution elections. But the longer I spent in the Sohag region the more I sensed that such support was shallow. Many people told me that they had voted for Morsi out of a vague sense that he was a devout Muslim, but now that they had seen the Brotherhood’s performance they didn’t plan on supporting the movement again. And the organization had no grass-roots presence. The nine villages in this region have a population of around sixty thousand, but there wasn’t a single office of the Brotherhood or the Freedom and Justice Party.

I was able to find only one Brother near Abydos. He was a young pharmacist named Mohamed Wajih, and he lived in a village about two miles from the Seti I temple. He was active in the Brotherhood’s district office, but he told me that he had been prevented from campaigning in Abydos during one of the post-revolution elections. This wasn’t on account of the police or the felool—Wajih’s father had forced him to remain quiet. “I was banned from leaving the house, because my father didn’t want me clashing with the other people in our clan,” Wajih said. Other Brothers in Upper Egypt told me that they also had a testy relationship with clan elders.

In Abydos, there are five or six main families, each with a rigidly hierarchical structure of male elders. Nothing about this system is democratic, and it hasn’t been touched by the revolution. In fact, the political upheaval has only strengthened the clans, which have more responsibility now that police and government are less active. On the first day of the archeological season, when the fight broke out among potential laborers, clan leaders came to the Buried and settled the conflict. And their continuity is a major reason that the region has remained so peaceful. There’s a large Christian settlement on one edge of the Buried, but nobody reported any sectarian tensions, even in the wake of Morsi’s fall.

In Egypt, when people talk about the national government, they use the word nizam, which can be translated as either “regime” or “system.” Both meanings are appropriate in Abydos, at least in the negative. There is no regime, and there is no system. The old National Democratic Party is gone, and the Muslim Brotherhood has essentially never existed in this area. The usual labels—Islamist, secularist, liberal, conservative, revolutionary, felool—are meaningless. Without the distraction of modern parties and definitions, it’s easier to recognize how much of local politics is timeless and elemental. Everything is face to face; everything is personal. Below the level of the governor, I never saw a computer on an official’s desk. My interviews took place amid a constant stream of citizens arriving with requests for unrelated things: a construction permit, an electricity connection, a land contract.

One day in el-Balyana, my translator and I were talking with the district president when we were interrupted by a man whose arms had been amputated below the elbows. “I want an apartment, because I want to find a wife and get married,” he announced. He spoke directly, without any of the polite introductions that are standard in Egypt. “I was injured in a train accident.”

He was twenty-one years old, a stern, bearded man in a blue galabiya, the wide sleeves hanging slack like broken wings. Since the revolution, a number of serious train accidents have been caused by breakdowns in safety systems. “Well, we have a project right now, and I’m supposed to get twenty-four units,” the president said. “If you’re lucky, I can put you at the top of the list. How much can you pay?”

“I can’t pay anything,” the man said. “I can’t work without arms. Give me a piece of land to cultivate.”

“Forget about that,” the president said. “You’re not going to work a piece of land. We can give you a kiosk with all the goods. You can just stand there and sell things.”

The man didn’t hesitate: “I want a kiosk at the entrance to the city.”

The president looked up—he seemed impressed by this boldness. His name was Sha’aban Qandil, and he was a heavyset man with a full mustache and a booming voice. Like the president in Abydos, he sat beneath an empty nail; there was a faint smudge on the wall where Mubarak’s portrait used to hang. The president promised the man that his kiosk would have a good location.

“I want prosthetic arms, too. I want the kiosk and prosthetic arms.”

One of the president’s assistants made a noise of exasperation. “Just work first, my son, and you’ll get the arms!”

The young man said that his medical records were in the front pocket of his galabiya. He waited there, sleeves dangling by his side, until the president walked over and fished the papers out of the gown. There was something intimate about the gesture, and the room fell silent. And then the president’s voice boomed out: “Put him at the top of the list! Give him a flat with three bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom! You’ll get married and enjoy yourself there!”

After the young man left, I asked the president if he was affected by disturbances in the capital. “I’m an executive!” he said, expansively. “I’m removed from the politics.” He smiled and added, “If a cloud forms in Cairo, it evaporates by the time it gets here.”

On the last night of the archeological season, a team of looters appeared in the Buried. Matthew Adams had instituted a system of around-the-clock watchmen, and one of them confronted the thieves and called the police. The cops arrived quickly and the looters fled without causing much damage. Adams seemed optimistic that the system would protect the site through the summer, when nobody would be excavating.

On his way back to New York, he stopped in Cairo, where he visited the office of the American Research Center in Egypt, or ARCE. The institution has long supported the research and conservation of Egyptian antiquities, with funding that comes in part from the State Department, and it helped pay for this season’s project in Abydos. Adams stopped to chat with Michael Jones, an Egyptologist who works at ARCE. The windows of Jones’s office had been covered with boards—ARCE is next to Tahrir, and protests had been flaring up, with demonstrators occasionally throwing rocks.

The two Egyptologists talked about the speculative nature of archeology. “The ancient Egyptians have been dead for thousands of years; nobody alive knows what they were thinking,” Jones said. “We create an image of them, and it’s based on our own ideas. It’s a bit like looking in a mirror.” He continued, “Most of what we find is broken. These are things that were thrown away. We’re dealing with a jigsaw puzzle where you only have two or three out of thousands of pieces.”

Adams explained that this is “post-processual theory,” the archeological version of postmodernism. Some believe that nothing we observe about ancient societies can be accurate, because invariably we’re applying our own experiences and viewpoints. But others counter that the essence of the human mind has changed very little in thousands of years, and basic desires and instincts remain the same, with certain societal patterns repeated endlessly. “We’re just a component of a much longer trajectory than we realize,” Adams said. “We think that this moment is special, that everything has led to this point. But our here and now is just a blip along the continuum.”

The conversation shifted to current events, and Jones mentioned that ARCE had briefly considered finding a temporary office away from Tahrir, because of the protests. “The nature of the flareups has changed,” he said. “There used to be a kind of festive atmosphere. Now it’s much more aggressive.” We discussed various theories about the Brotherhood and the military, although none of us knew much; the modern politics had become as enigmatic as any strand of Egyptology. It was hard to believe that two years out of five thousand could feel so long. ♦

Peter Hessler is a staﬀ writer living in Ridgway, Colorado. His book “The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution,” will be out next spring.

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